The role of social meaning in inattentional blindness: When the gorillas in our midst do not go unseen

a r t i c l e i n f o Without visual attention, even the obvious–like a gorilla walking through a scene of people–goes undetected This " inattentional blindness " is a persistent, well-documented limitation of the human visual system. The current research examines whether social meaning reduces this visual bias by imbuing unexpected objects with signal value, thus increasing their relevance and facilitating perception. Using one of the most established illustrations of inattentional blindness, we show for the first time that activating a social association, even an erroneous one (i.e., the African American–ape association), drastically attenuates inattentional blindness. This is not accounted for by visual feature matching. Rather, these results suggest that social meaning, even when flawed, may direct our visual system towards associated visual information that would otherwise be overlooked. As such, these results provide a powerful replication of the African American–ape association and illustrate that this broadly held association has the power to spontaneously change the content of one's visual world. People give great authority to what they see with their eyes. In fact, we are shocked when faced with the limits of our visual system, such as when veering out of the way of a previously unseen child crossing the road or when a bicyclist suddenly appears " out of nowhere " before our car. What accounts for these moments in which sight fails us? Research in cognitive psychology provides an unequivocal answer – without attention, even visual information of great consequence may not reach conscious perception This phenomenon , inattentional blindness, is especially robust and forces us to recognize that the content of the perceived visual world is significantly limited. of the primary role of attention in perception involves showing people a video of 2 teams with 3 players each, passing balls to one another. Participants are instructed to count the number of passes made among the players in white shirts. In the middle of the video, someone wearing a gorilla costume enters the scene from the right, pauses and beats her chest, and then exits (see Fig. 1). This " gorilla " is on the screen for approximately 9 s of the 30-s video and passes directly through the participant's visual field, plainly visible to anyone not counting the passes. However, only 42% of participants detected the " gorilla " (Simons & Chabris, 1999); with their attention allocated to counting the ball passes, …